About FM-Alive

Who is this guy?

I started FM programming in 1988 (grainy photie) and wrote an editor and librarian for the DX7 in 8086 assembler for the PC. Back in those days the Atari ST was the "serious" musicians computer (much as is the Mac today), and the PC was widely thought to be a dead-end sideline for IBM. The PC's potential though was obvious to anyone who had endured queueing to hand in punch cards for the next mainframe run "tomorrow". However it was comparatively expensive: in those days a 10mb hard disk cost twice as much as a 1TB disk now. I had two objectives: to simplify the fiendishly difficult task of creating musically interesting sounds on the DX and to cut the cost of storing patches. Anyone who has gazed at the MK1 DX7's tiny LCD will understand the first objective. And at the time Yamaha's memory cartridges cost around $100/£45 (treble that in today's money) and they stored just 32 voices, roughly 3.5k ! That made the alternative of storing stuff on the PC seem really attractive. My DOS-based DX7 editor is still available (free) and works under Windows, right up to XP SP2. Although it's small - 25k- you can edit any DX patch with it and use it to manage your patches in much the same way as DX Manager.

VB and the SY series

One of my goals in trying to make FM programming more intuitive was to enable you to hear the results of your editing in real-time using graphics for sound shaping. That was well beyond my ability/lifetime in DOS, but then Visual Basic arrived and was the ideal tool for the job. VB's arrival in the early 90's more or less coincided with Yamaha's final attempt to recreate the success of the DX7 before ditching FM, the SY77.

The result - SY Manager version 1 was published on Compuserv in 1993. It is still the only full featured, graphical editor and librarian available for the SY77/SY99.

Like many people, I found the SY's sounds a bit thin in comparison to the DX7. So I wrote a patch converter utility, X2Y, that gives accurate translations of those nice fat DX patches. X2Y is used in both DXM3 and SYM3 but is available as a stand-alone Win app. (free).

DX Manager

SY Manager filled a niche in FM programming and encouraged me to go back to the classic DX7 after a 15 year gap to develop a completely new editor/librarian.

Imaginatively called DX Manager and with just about every patch management feature I could think of. DXM version 1, written in VB6, was released in April 2002.

.Net and Versions 2 and 3

From the mail I received about DXM1, most users found it "does what it says on the tin", but when .Net arrived in 2003 I decided on a complete rewrite adding new features that would have been practically impossible in VB6.

Nearly three years later I released DXM2 as commercial shareware - a big change for me after giving away literally thousands of copies of my programs over the years and a reluctant one brought about by finding my stuff being sold on EBay.

Three years on again saw DXM3 released with the addition of long overdue support for the large family of 4-Operator FM synths.

SY Manager

Rewriting SY Manager for .net was an even bigger challenge than rewriting DXM1. The SY remains the most complex FM synthesiser of all-time and as the years pass there are fewer people around who have detailed knowledge of its workings.

Apart from giving SYM3 the "look and feel" of DXM3 I particularly wanted to help SY users who's floppy drives had packed up and needed to rescue patch data on disk. I reverse engineered the floppy format but was only partially successful: SYM3 reads all synth data (voice, multi,pan etc.) but not the sequencer section of these files including, importantly, SDS samples.

It seems there is now no-one on the planet who has a detailed understanding of the KSEQ file format Yamaha used for SY sequencer file format. I hope someone will prove me wrong but until then the only route to extract this data is via a working floppy drive. SY99 owners of course can convert sequencer files to standard MIDI files from the synth's front panel.

SYM3 was released in December 2008.

Future plans

DXM and SYM now provide comprehensive support for most of Yamahas 80's and early 90's synths. However I'm always interested in extending the range - as long as it's FM based - so get in touch if you feel I've missed yours.

I had hoped to add support in DXM3 for the Grey Matter Reponse E! card. There are a large number of E! users and it's a shame that full support for the MKI and MKII cards' features is not available. GMR no longer exist as such and all efforts to locate the full midi spec. of the cards have so far failed.

If you have the spec. (which must include details of the GMR bulk sysex formats not this) or know where it can be located, contact me with this info. and I will provide a free DXM license (or refund) in return. In 2010 I completed adding MK1 E! code to DXM3 but still need the full MIDI spec. to test out my efforts at reverse engineering.

Top of the list for further development of SYM3 is the addition of free-form algorithm editing. So if you find the 45 "stock" algorithms a bit limiting I hope to get a visual editor for this frequently requested feature together in 2012.

The DX7 sound is so strong and unmistakably FM that the synth and FM's nemesis, the SY77/99, deserve a better future than just ending up as a software "clone".

Today, there is huge interest in creating new and original music using classic synth technology. So if you are one of the 160,000 DX7 owners out there, get it down out of the loft and enjoy making real music again.

Thanks for your interest in FM-Alive.